


Unmade

by lily_zen



Series: Infected (All This Sweetness Left to Rot) [1]
Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Angst, Awkward Kissing, First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-05-01 14:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5209652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lily_zen/pseuds/lily_zen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recent speculation about G-Dragon's sexuality drives a wedge between friends, and Seungri is way too astute.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unmade

Unmade

 

Fandom: BIGBANG RPF

Pairing: G-Dragon/Seungri

Rating: T/PG-13

Warnings: light homoerotic content, cussing

Author: Lily Zen

 

Author’s Notes: I’m pulling from recent events here, but this is ultimately and above all a work of fiction. Please keep that in mind while reading. Also, I used some rough translations of various BIGBANG lyrics as section breaks to help inform your reading. This is not to suggest that the songs themselves are Nyongtory related, just that they happened to fit here very well. For those who don’t know, LGBTQIA stands for “Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Trans*-Queer-Intersex-Asexual.”

 

Disclaimer: BIGBANG is composed of real people, and as such, I do not and cannot own them. This subsequent work is not for profit, and as these are fictionalized versions of their on-stage personas, the content herein should be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, it’s just a story, and I don’t own anything.

 

\---

 

The media goes insane whenever he touches Seungri; absolutely loses their shit. Now it’s all speculation: Is he gay? Are they dating? What about Kiko? YG’s worried because right now it’s just too much of a hot button topic. There are protestors in the streets waving banners for both sides; not just for him, of course, but for LGBTQIA rights as a whole.

Jiyong’s always walked a fine line. Standards of beauty are a little different in Korea, and it’s not seen as such a slight against his masculinity if a man likes to wear a bit of foundation. He’s a small man even at twenty-seven with, though it pains him to say it, pretty, elfin features. In his early twenties, he’d had an epiphany: he could either spend the rest of his life trying to fight it, or just give in and embrace his looks, use them to his advantage. Thus, he’d started creating the current day iteration of “G-Dragon,” branding himself in a unique way that contested the boundaries of masculinity while using his occupation as a rapper to still position himself firmly as a man. Yes, he wore make-up and dressed outrageously in things like pink, glittery pants and flower patterned shirts, but his lyrics were explicit, bordering on obscene, when it came to claims of sexual prowess with women.

It worked; it worked for the longest time, but with a broadening audience came, he suddenly realized, different rules, different expectations. Overseas fans looked at him with their biases and gender norms firmly in place, bringing their interpretation to bear on his performance. He confused and aroused them, took all their norms and blew them to pieces, and what was left were a bunch of wildly circulating rumors that he, Kwon Jiyong, was fucking his bandmate. He hadn’t anticipated that.

He has gay friends. Of course, he does. Jiyong works in the entertainment industry and runs frequently with the fashion crowd. They’re everywhere, impossible to escape, and having liberal parents himself he’d always been taught to accept love in all its forms; it was rare enough on its own without people willingly turning away because it didn’t fit some standard definition. And if he was gay and in love with Seungri, then he’d own it, because that’s the kind of man he thought himself to be. But he wasn’t—gay, that is—he just liked being close to people, especially to people he trusts.

\---

_I act tough, but I’m not inside_

\---

The tour wraps, and YG makes it a point to send him and Seungri as far apart as humanly possible. “Just until things cool off a bit, Jiyong,” Hyun Suk says apologetically.

Jiyong shrugs, but he’s biting the inside of his cheek because yeah, he gets it, but he thinks it’s fucking stupid. Seungri is one of his best friends. Why should a few tabloid rumors force him abroad? They’ve always been close—well, okay, an internal voice prompts him to edit, not _always_ , but close enough—from the time they were kids, both lonely and a little shellshocked, crawling into the same bed because sometimes they missed their homes so much it was like a cold stone in their guts. Seungri cried a lot then, and Jiyong curved his body around the younger boy’s back, trying to ease his pain while fighting off waves of his own.

He opens his mouth to say something. What he doesn’t know yet, and it turns out not to matter because Hyun Suk cuts him off in his nasally voice that says he’s not going to negotiate this: “Besides, don’t you have a full schedule as well? Something about a trip to Paris?”

“Yes,” Jiyong agrees. He was going to try to drag Seungri along with him. Seungri wasn’t into fashion the way he was, but he’d go if he knew there was a chance to rub elbows with models.

“Then you won’t be needing his company anyway,” Hyun Suk says confidently, and Jiyong takes that to mean that the subject is officially closed.

\---

_Under the same sky at different places_

\---

He spends the next few days making retaliatory “sad Jiyong” posts on his Instagram: pictures of him alone and listless, cryptic messages, a watery, gray sky. They fuel the fire, he knows, but he just doesn’t give a damn. This has happened before, albeit to a lesser extent, and eventually will work itself out. When Seungri has time, he puts up pictures of the two of them with the ‘nyongtory’ tag to let Ji know that he misses hanging out too. It was hard to go from almost constant contact on the tour to this enforced radio silence.

It isn’t until they have to meet up for more shows in Japan that they all meet again. Even then they get warned to watch themselves, so if they go out, they make sure someone else is present, but at least they get to say ‘hey’ in person.

\---

_Don’t ask anything I can’t answer now_

\---

He’s holed up in his hotel room for the night, make-up off, sweatpants on, when the knock on the door comes. Jiyong’s not a big fan of shouting across the room, so he gets up and pads to the door, peeks through the peep hole, and then undoes the lock.

“Hey,” he says as Seungri slips inside, tired from the show and holding a bag that smells suspiciously like contraband fast food. Jiyong is immediately more pleased to see him, even at such a late hour.

“Hey, hyung,” Seungri greets as he kicks off his slippers. He crawls onto Jiyong’s bed with the food. “I got hungry, so I sent out for something; figured you might want some.”

After relocking the door, Jiyong crosses the room. The light from the television flickers on the walls, and turns Seungri’s hair into an interesting shade of aqua for a moment until the scene changes.

“You want a beer?” Ji asks, but it’s not a serious question. He already knows Seunghyun is going to say yes, so he grabs two from the mini-fridge anyway, and hands one over while his friend is nodding yes around a mouthful of hamburger.

Sitting down next to Seungri, he digs in the bag for the second hamburger, knocking over a container of fries in the process. The paper crinkles loudly in the gloom, drowning out the sound of the voices on the T.V. It’s okay, he’s got the closed captioning on anyway to help improve his Japanese, so at least he can read along.

They’re quiet as they eat, but it’s not uncomfortable. Seungri’s spine is relaxed as he leans against the headboard, and Jiyong is all stretched out in that way he only gets when he feels really safe. Otherwise, it’s been pointed out to him, he has a tendency to curl in on himself a little defensively. He can’t help it though, even when he consciously tries to stop it.

Finally, Ji says, “You looked like you were having fun while you were gone.”

“It was nice to have a break,” Seungri agrees. He tosses a used napkin back in the bag, and then scoots closer, laying his head on Jiyong’s shoulder. It’s a rare moment for them, and one not meant for cameras.

Like he used to do when they were younger, Jiyong reaches up, placing his hand on the back of Seungri’s neck, and rubs gently at the tension he finds there.

“The tour’s been hard,” Ji says. “I can’t wait to go home for more than a few days.” He’s still jamming fries into his mouth with his free hand, finding an odd sort of rhythm between the two tasks. It wasn’t until Seungri showed up with food that he realized how hungry he was. Just the smell of salt and grease had been enough to awaken his appetite.

Seungri laughs a little at his muffled voice, then puts a hand on Jiyong’s leg to help prop him upright. His eyelids are fluttering, lashes just brushing the dark circles standing out in stark relief on his face.

“Tired?” Jiyong asks.

Seungri yawns in response.

“I was thinking,” Jiyong finds himself blurting out, “we should go somewhere after the tour’s done. I mean really done. Some place to relax; the Bahamas, maybe.”

“We’ll have to see what YG has to say about it,” Seungri says in his oh-so-reasonable I-am-an-adult tone, and Jiyong’s hand reflexively clenches on the back of his friend’s neck.

He doesn’t want to ask for permission. He _shouldn’t_ have to ask for permission. He’s an adult, he makes millions for that company; the least they could do is let him hang out with his friends in peace and quiet. Jiyong had to fight down his own impulse to curse. He was sick of this already.

Seungri can’t help but to notice Ji’s sudden tension though, and so he straightens himself up so he can look at his hyung’s face. To a stranger, it would come off as inscrutable, but there’s a narrowness to the eyes that’s familiar enough.

“Ji,” he sighs, shucking formality because Jiyong needed realness then, not some silly roles they played at YG’s insistence. He grabs Jiyong’s hand, which is small in his, the delicate bones of his cocked wrist giving it a decidedly feminine look.

Jiyong looks up, surprised, and meets Seungri’s steady gaze.

“Jiyong, you just need to be patient,” Seungri says, feeling older than his years. “This will go away.”

“What—“ Jiyong starts and stops, biting down hard on his lip. He glances away toward the flickering television, then back to Seungri. “This is so _stupid_ ,” he huffs out loud for the first time. “I don’t understand why people are making such a big deal out of this. It’s just a few rumors. We’re _friends_ ; friends can’t be physically close?” He grips Seungri’s hand back, looking at him with pleading eyes.

“It’s because we’re adults now, Ji,” Seungri replies, and he’s not saying anything that Jiyong doesn’t already know. “It comes across as a bit odd.”

“I _am_ a bit odd,” Jiyong groans. He glances at the ceiling for a moment, pleading to no one—god, maybe—for understanding. He’d spent most of his life away from home, had been working in show business since he was six. He could recognize his own emotional immaturity as a result of that. It was taking him much longer than other men his age to grow up. As long as he was on stage or in the studio, he was fine; as long as he was G-Dragon, he was perfectly in control, but anytime Kwon Jiyong needed to make an appearance, he felt awkward in his own skin and a little bit paralyzed.

“I know,” Seungri says, leaning into him again although he didn’t release his grip on Jiyong’s hand, “and YG knows that, but nobody else knows that. And if—“

“If what?” Jiyong bites out when Seungri’s words abruptly stop. He doesn’t like this, not at all. It feels a little too much like his character’s on trial.

Seungri continues in a gentler voice. “If YG was to make a statement, it wouldn’t be good for you, Ji, and it wouldn’t be good for them.”

No, Jiyong supposes, it wouldn’t be. They’d have to say he was emotionally stunted, that maybe it had something to do with being separated from his family so young, deprived of normal childhood experiences. That would put YG’s whole business model at stake. They’d have to stop recruiting children to train them into perfect pop stars. There might be a backlash against the industry model as a whole, because that’s how they all did it.

Instead of talking about any of that, Jiyong growls, “It’s just fanservice. It sells. It’s statistically proven that it sells.” He crushed the top of the paper bag closed in his hand, and throws the whole greasy mess toward the garbage can, jostling Seungri against his shoulder. He overshoots, and it bounces against the floor two feet away from where the trash can rests at the end of the hotel desk.

“I know that,” Seungri agrees, his voice soft and melodic, almost like he’s singing to Jiyong. “You know that.” It had been part of their agreement years ago. Once the two boys figured out that their cutesy stories about their friendship—cuddling, holding hands, playing together on stage and in photoshoots—actually correlated with a rise in record sales, they’d decided to incorporate it as part of their stage performance intentionally. Jiyong would chase, and Seungri would run; the girls went crazy for it, especially in Japan. Yaoi and shonen-ai were big over there; Big Bang was just capitalizing on its popularity. “Hell,” Seungri scoffed, “even YG knows it. It’s just...it’s tense, politically, right now. Not so much here, but back home, shit’s going down. Things are going to change; which way, nobody knows yet.”

He knows; Jiyong knows all this, yet it is taking all his self-control not to tell South Korea and its social problems to go fuck themselves. He was _G-Dragon_ , and _they_ were Nyongtory, and if anybody didn’t like it, they could fuck off; that’s what the petulant, perpetually fifteen year old boy in him was yelling.

“What if we just kissed?” he blurts out, then immediately regrets it as Seungri sits up a little straighter to look at him, his dark, straight eyebrows creeping up toward his hairline.

“I think,” Seungri begins slowly, seriously, “that the world would explode in a pink mushroom cloud of fangirl hormones.”

Jiyong looks over at him, shocked, only to find that Seungri is smiling, his shoulders shaking as he tries not to laugh.

“I mean,” Jiyong hurries to elucidate his train of thought, “if we just did it on camera once, we could play it off like a great, big joke. You could act all disgusted, and maybe I could say something like, ‘Hm, no, not a thing.’ People’s curiosity would be satisfied, and then we could just go back to normal, tension dispelled.”

Of course, his explanation doesn’t help things at all. By the time he finishes, Seungri’s lying on the bed, and he’s got his hands over his face as he laughs and laughs and laughs. His heels kick against the bed a little, sending tiny earthquakes shuddering through the mattress.

This, Jiyong acknowledges with a twitch of his lips, is why they’re friends. Not because of the band, not because of the label, not because they are both lonely, homesick boys cowering in their hearts and minds, but because when they are together, they are not those things at all. When Seungri and Jiyong are together, it’s just Seungri and Jiyong, and they make each other laugh when no one else can.

When Seungri finally calms himself enough to pull his hands away from his face, Jiyong adds with false gravity, “I wouldn’t even slip you the tongue.”

That, of course, sets off another peal of laughter, but now it’s both of them and Jiyong is trying not to feel giddy at that. They’re still friends. Everything is still fine. These idiotic rumors will die down, and Jiyong and Seungri can go back to being friends—immature, ridiculous, overly affectionate friends—in public once again.

Then as the giggles trail off, Seungri suddenly gets a look in his eye, and it’s one that Jiyong’s seen a time or two in the past. It always spells trouble for him, but before he can verbally interrogate it, Seungri darts up. He smashes his mouth against Jiyong’s. Their teeth click, and Seungri’s nose is jammed up against his face.

For a moment, all the world exists in that space, the point where their lips touch. Jiyong can feel his pulse in his lips. He inhales in shock, and tastes burgers and fries—Seungri had something with a spicy sauce on it—and their lips are slick with leftover grease. He feels something twist inside of him, some terrible knowledge rising up from the depths of the soul he didn’t want to explore. Longing hits him, so sharp that it’s unreal; it should be impossible to be plunged into wanting this far this fast.

Seungri is pulling away, and he giggles a little, not maliciously, but like it’s just another game, like they’re on stage in front of thousands of fangirls screaming for more. The look on his face turns unexpectedly gentle.

Gazing at it, Jiyong feels a part of him break, a touchstone that he’d made part of his identity when he was twenty years old and had to decide whether or not to embrace his androgynous looks. _How could he still be a man and look like a woman?_

“That’s why, Jiyong-hyung, we could never kiss on stage,” Seungri says, and rolls off the bed, “because Tom wouldn’t know what to do if he ever actually caught Jerry, and neither do you.”

Jiyong watches Seungri walk to where the fast food bag had landed. He’s hyperaware of the way Seungri’s gray sweatpants hang low on his hips, and his white t-shirt is a little tight around his biceps. When Seungri bends to pick up the fallen trash, Jiyong closes his eyes because he doesn’t want to see any more, and takes a deep breath.

It’s then he hears Seungri’s contemplative voice: “I think you’re more like that cat in the Pepe LePeu cartoons, the one who always looks like a skunk.”

“Does that make you Pepe?” Jiyong asks before he can stop himself, and opens his eyes to find Seungri standing next to the trash can, gazing at him fondly.

“No,” Seungri laughs and shakes his head. “If I was chasing you, you’d know it. I’ve got no subtlety.”

“Just like the skunk,” Jiyong can’t help but to point out with a smirk.

Seungri grins at that. “Yes, but I set my sights on willing targets.” Then Seungri dissipates the tension with a silly look, a yawn, and a stretch. “Oh, man, I’m tired now. Goodnight, hyung. Remember, just be patient, things will go back to normal soon enough.”

“Goodnight,” Jiyong replies, his voice thin and uncertain as Seungri stuffs his feet back into his slippers and heads for the door. As he watches his friend’s retreating back, he can’t help but to feel as though Seungri has taken a part of him, ripped it apart—unintentionally or not—broken and re-made him into something new.

He sits in the dark for a long time, not watching T.V., or working on music, or any number of a dozen things that need doing, because it’s all he can do to stave off the urge to cry. What just happened here? What was he supposed to do with this? He’s twenty-seven, and he’s never felt like this: like he can’t breathe, like his heart is beating in his throat, like his stomach’s dropped down to his balls and curled up there somewhere to hide.

“Fuck,” he hisses in the dark, and punches the fluffy, white comforter. “ _Fuck_.”

\---

_If it’s not too late, can’t we go back to what we were?_

\---

**FIN**


End file.
